One nerdy pastor's proclamation, examination and defense of the
Great Eucatastrophe.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Apologetics 101, Part 1: Evaluating Truth Claims

What is truth? Which truth? Whose truth? Yours? Mine? This
spiritual figure or that? His holy book or hers? Which religious claim to truth
is the real one? Will the real religion please stand up?! While it is entirely
possible that all the world’s religions are wrong, they can’t all be right;
that would be most illogical. it But how do we go about evaluating which one
out of the thousands of the world religions, if any, is true? And with that, we’re right back to the question of the day: What
is truth? Long before Jack Nicholson or Pontius Pilate uttered anything about
truth, Satan toyed with this very same question in the Garden of Eden. “Did God
really say?” In other words, “Is God’s Word true?”What is truth? That was Pilate’s question to Jesus during
his interrogation. And people have been
coming up with failed answer after failed answer. Many claim the question –
what is truth? – can be answered by common sense, intuition, authority, sincerity
or even religious experience. As we will discover, these sources of truth are
entirely inadequate responses to the question.Here a little bit of logic goes a long way. It also happens
to be useful common ground in talking with non-Christians. Which is why, when
we are trying to answer the question, “what is truth?” we must avoid begging
the question, that is assuming the conclusion you are trying to prove before
you there. For example: “Miracles do not exist because there is uniform
experience against miracles; I have never seen a miracle; therefore miracles do
not exist.” Or, “We know god exists because the book says so and god wrote the
book so we know god exists.” Begging the question and circular reasoning are
kissing cousins of illogical proportions.

Thus, when we are defending the Christian faith, we must plot
our course carefully through well-reasoned arguments, avoiding the Scylla and
Charybdis of begging the question and circular reasoning.

Truth is fundamental to every human endeavor. Science, Law,
History, Medicine, not to mention the entire education system of Western
Civilization and the like rests on the foundation that truth and knowledge are both
attainable and knowable. Both intellectual (is it true?) and existential meaning
(what do I need?) in life is built upon truth. Not to mention morality, ethics
and human rights.

So, when it comes to the quest for truth, let’s test some of
the examples mentioned above and see how they fail to give us an adequate
source of truth in defending the Christian faith. Though hardly exhaustive,
here are several common ways people claim to have the truth on their side of
the argument.

·Common Sense
and Intuition.Common sense is anything
but common. More importantly, people of mutually incompatible religious positions
all claim to have common sense on their side. This cannot be so. If common
sense were an accurate source of truth, we all would have the same common
beliefs. So it is with Intuition. If
our intuition was a reliable source of truth for making religious claims, we
all would believe the same thing. Intuition can be wrong just as common sense
is uncommon. How do you know the voice of your common sense is really the voice
of God or the voice of the devil? Indeed, many people claim to receive special
messages from God – messages which frequently have to do with your wallet.

·Appealing
to Authority (or multiple sources of authority).Many claim to have authority on their side:
Muslims have the Qur’an, Mormons have the Book of Mormon, Christians have the
Old and New Testament, and Jews reject the New but retain, at least in some
manner, the Old Testament. Making a claim to authority is not the same as establishing
the truth of the authority any more than my opinions and claims to know
everything about the weather qualify me to be a meteorologist. We must ask
whether or not the source of authority itself is trustworthy. Just because an
authority claims to be from God hardly means it is. Plenty of people on the
boardwalk in Venice Beach claim the same thing but are not trustworthy. Or
consider that Mormon doctrine teaches that the Garden of Eden was located
somewhere near Jackson County, Missouri. And that God spoke to Joseph Smith by
means of special golden plates which have never been found and have no
archaeological evidence whatsoever suggesting any of the places or names in the
Book of Mormon actually existed outside of Joseph Smith’s brain.

Having multiple sources of authority only
further complicates the problem. Every religious position has a source of
authority, whether that source is a book, a person, or some kind of inner
burning of the bosom. Again, we know that they all could be false, but not all
of these claims to authority can be true. The question is, how do we determine
which ones are false? And how do we determine which, if any, are true? In order
to answer that we must test and examine the source of authority from the
outside, with a criteria that is separate from the source of authority you are
studying. This will yield an objective answer. The method must precede the
conclusion. Apologetics 101, part 2 will address the historical / evidential
method of defending the Christian faith.

·Sincerity.Many have thought that the sincerity of faith
determines whether or not something is true. Sincerity can be lethal. Stalin
was quite sincere about his systematic extermination of political opponents.
And Jim Jones convinced his followers that the Kool-aid they were drinking was
sincerely good for them. Both examples demonstrate that you can be sincere
about many things, and more importantly, sincerely wrong. Even sincerity of
faith is a tenuous position to hold. Many religious teachers have said, “If you
just believe enough, or pray hard enough, or are sincere in your faith, you’d
know these things to be true.” How do you measure sincerity? A faith-o-meter?
Measure it by works? The result is usually faith in faith which is pure nonsense.
Neither is faith magic. What is critically important is the object of faith. I may sincerely believe
that my pet rabbit, Milo, will lay a golden egg on Easter morning worth
millions – but my faith would be foolishly misplaced. And similarly, I may sincerely
doubt that Disney Land is in Anaheim, California and located, rather, in Minot,
North Dakota. In either case, neither my faith nor my doubts change the
underlying facts. And facts are stubborn things.

·Religious
Experience.Testimonies and personal
experiences abound. However, there are just as many religious experiences as
there are religions. Again, they can’t all be right because they make mutually
contradictory claims to truth. There’s another logical problem here. We can’t
equate “what is” with “what ought to be.” This is also known as the
sociological fallacy. Here’s an example: If we say, “65% of college students
engage in x behavior,” we have said
nothing of whether or not x behavior
is true, much less right or wrong. Simply claiming truth on the basis of a religious
experience does not in fact make it true. This is falls into the “buy it and
try it” trap. “Give Jesus, or Buddhist meditation, Christian Science or the
Kool-aid a try, you’ll like it. It works for me!” Religious positions require
total commitment on the part the person. The question, as always, must be: is
it true? And this requires investigation. Something Christianity is entirely
open to since it has nothing to hide; you’ll find no spaghetti monsters, magic
pills or goofy drinks here. St. Paul lays it all out on the table, read 1
Corinthians 15.

So, if all of these methods are inadequate, what then, is
the best way to go about investigating a religious truth claim? And where does
Christianity fit into all of this? This series, Apologetics 101, is designed to follow up on this question as we explore
the basic points of the empirical/historical method, used by lawyers,
historians and apologists to defend the Christian faith. It is this approach
that gives us the best arguments when defending the Christian faith.

Thankfully, when it comes to the Christian faith – what we
believe, teach, confess and defend – we don’t have to rely upon the level of
our genuine sincerity, the power and emotion of our religious experience, our
common sense, or even circular reasoning. We have historical, trustworthy,
eyewitness testimony about the life and work of Jesus who took on human flesh
to suffer and die for the sins of the world. He claimed to be the way, the
truth and the life (John 14:6) and backed that up by dying and rising from the
dead. With that in mind, the question is not really: what is truth? Rather, who is truth? And if you get the answer
to that question right, all the others fall into place.